Chargebee joins the unicorn club at a $1.4 billion valuation after raising $125M in funding to grow its subscription management platform

It was just like yesterday when we wrote about Chargebee after the subscription management startup raised $14 million in Series D funding to expand its product offerings and build an end-to-end ecosystem. In 2019 when we last wrote about Chargebee, the startup had 1,800 customers in 53 countries. Today, Chargebee is used by over 6,000 businesses in 60 countries.

The global pandemic has accelerated the already growing shift to SaaS and subscription-based business models from cars to coffee providers. Demand for moving into a recurring revenue stream is expected to grow at a 17.5% CAGR over the next five years.

With subscription businesses expanding worldwide, each recurring revenue business needs more options and flexibility to manage varied billing use-cases. Fast-growing SaaS businesses are now investing in streamlining their revenue operations to identify leakage and capture opportunities across their revenue cycle. Chargebee frees businesses from spaghetti billing and enables them with a powerful subscription infrastructure that lets them scale their business process as they grow.

Yesterday, the San Francisco-based Chargebee announced a fresh round of $125 million in series G funding to become a new member of the highly coveted unicorn club. The round was co-led by new investor Sapphire Ventures and existing investors Tiger Global and Insight Venture Partners, along with participation from another existing investor, Steadview Capital.

The new round of funding will allow Chargebee to expand its global footprint and further add to its partnership network. Chargebee is now valued at $1.4 billion, which triples its valuation in less than 6 months.

Founded in 2011 by KP Saravanan, Krish Subramanian, Rajaraman Santhanam, and Thiyagarajan T, Chargebee automates revenue operations of high-growth, subscription-based businesses. Its SaaS platform helps businesses manage and grow their revenue by automating subscriptions, billing, invoicing, payments, and revenue recognition processes and it provides key reports, metrics, and insights into their subscription business.

Used by over 6,000 companies in 60 countries using more than 120 currencies, Chargebee first became commercially available in mid-2012. Chargebee has an extensive customer portfolio that includes brands like Okta, Freshworks, Calendly, Study.com, and thousands of other high-growth subscription businesses.

As a core revenue enabler for thousands of subscription businesses, Chargebee’s rapid growth has further been spurred by its fastest time-to-value and its long-term investment in customer growth. Chargebee’s platform is easy to implement; onboarding can be completed in less than ten days – even for large global enterprises.

“Today we’re able to roll out a new pricing experiment in 30 minutes and converge on the right pricing point that suits our customer segments. Chargebee has given us the freedom to make mistakes, and then fix them right away,” said Paul Kapsner, Director of Finance at Superfoods company and a long-term customer of Chargebee.

The company recently brought out enterprise-class capabilities like usage-based billing and a dedicated data center for Europe while getting consistently ranked #1 by customers among all Finance Products in review sites such as G2.

“Businesses today need to quickly respond to evolving customer needs, compliance requirements, and market pressures in real-time. More than ever before, businesses need their subscription revenue platform to be the reliable system of record that enables them to rapidly scale their revenue processes,” said Krish Subramanian, Co-founder and CEO at Chargebee. “Chargebee is committed to spearheading this movement towards a subscription-first world by helping our customers realize rapid value, and being an integral partner in their long-term growth journey.”